# Apple Ads search popularity, explained: what the 1–100 score means for your App Store keywords

By Mika Heinonen (Indie iOS developer and maker of Fledly). Published 2026-10-27, updated 2026-10-27.
Canonical: https://fledly.app/blog/apple-ads-search-popularity/

> Apple's search popularity score is the only first-party measure of App Store search demand. What the 1–100 and 1–5 values mean, why most keywords have no score, what we see in 66 weeks of US data, and how to use it to pick keywords.

**Key takeaways**

- Apple Ads publishes a **search popularity score from 1 to 100** for App Store search terms, per country, weekly or monthly. **100 is the most popular search in that country.** It is a relative score, not a search count.
- Apple only lists the **top 500 searches per category** (15 categories). In the US that is **7,500 terms a week**, and the lowest listed score was **41–55** depending on the category. Everything else has **no score**, which means "fewer searches than the cut-off", not "no searches".
- Most of the highest scores are **brand and app names** (*chatgpt*, *doordash*, *strava*). Generic searches a small app can target mostly sit between **45 and 65**: *meal planner* 53, *habit tracker* 56, *sleep tracker* 59, *budget app* 60.
- The **1–5 version is too coarse** to choose keywords with: in the US list, almost 80% of terms are a 3.
- Use the score to **rank candidate searches**, not to forecast downloads. Combine it with how strong the current top 10 is, and use autocomplete to order the terms Apple doesn't score.

Apple doesn't publish how many people search for a keyword on the App Store. The closest thing it offers is the **search popularity** score in Apple Ads, the App Store's own ad platform. Almost every ASO tool, including Fledly, builds on it. It is also widely misread, so this guide sticks to what Apple documents and what we've seen in 66 weeks of stored US data.

## What Apple actually provides

The Apple Ads Platform API has an endpoint for this, *Search Term Popularity Query*. Apple describes it as retrieving "the relative search volume ranking of search terms for a given App Store genre and country or region." For each search term, it returns:

| Field | What it is (Apple's definition, shortened) |
|:--|:--|
| `searchPopularity1to100` | Popularity on a 1–100 scale across all categories in the country; 100 = most popular overall |
| `searchPopularityInGenre` | Popularity within one category, 1–100 |
| `rankInGenre` | The term's rank by volume within its category |
| `searchPopularity1to5` | Relative popularity on a 1–5 scale across all categories |

Data is available by **week** (Sunday to Saturday) or by **month**, for each App Store country. The categories are Apple's 15 broad ones: Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, News & Magazines, Photo & Video, Productivity & Utilities, Shopping, Social Networking, Sports and Travel.

Two words in Apple's description matter: **relative** and **ranking**. The score tells you how a search compares to other searches in the same country, not how many times it was typed.

## The blind spot: only the top 500 per category

The endpoint returns the *most popular* searches in each category, not a lookup for any keyword you choose. In our data the list is capped at **500 terms per category per week**. In the US, that's 15 × 500 = **7,500 terms**, and each term appears under exactly one category.

Below the 500th term there's nothing. For the US week of October 18, 2026, the lowest score that made each category's list was:

| Category | Lowest listed score |
|:--|--:|
| Sports | 41 |
| News & Magazines | 44 |
| Education, Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Photo & Video | 46 |
| Travel | 47 |
| Business, Health & Fitness | 48 |
| Shopping | 50 |
| Finance | 51 |
| Social Networking | 52 |
| Entertainment | 53 |
| Games, Productivity & Utilities | 55 |

*Figure: The lowest Apple Ads popularity score that made each category's top-500 list, US, week of October 18, 2026.*

So in Productivity, a search needs a score of about 55 just to appear. A search that would score 50 has no score at all, while a 41 in Sports does. When a tool shows "no data" or a flat "5" for a keyword, it's usually this cut-off, not a measurement. Many ASO tools display 5 as the minimum. Read it as "below the list".

The cut-off is much harsher in small countries. In Finland, the whole weekly list held **400 terms across all categories**, because few Finnish searches pass the threshold. For smaller markets, most of your keywords will never get an Apple score.

## What the scores look like

Of the 7,500 US terms in the week of October 18, 2026:

| Score | Terms | Share |
|:--|--:|--:|
| 40–49 | 1,842 | 25% |
| 50–59 | 3,947 | 53% |
| 60–69 | 1,381 | 18% |
| 70–79 | 282 | 4% |
| 80–100 | 48 | 0.6% |

*Figure: How the 7,500 listed US searches are distributed. More than half score between 50 and 59.*

The median listed term scores **54**. Scores above 70 are rare, and they are almost all **brands and app names**. The top of each category list is people looking for a specific app: *mychart*, *strava* and *planet fitness* in Health & Fitness; *chatgpt*, *vpn*, *gmail* and *chrome* in Productivity; *mcdonalds app*, *doordash* and *uber eats* in Food & Drink. A small app can't win those searches, and shouldn't try.

The generic searches a new app can target live lower down:

| Search (US) | Category | Score | Rank in category |
|:--|:--|--:|--:|
| translator | Education | 69 | 8 |
| budget app | Finance | 60 | 118 |
| to do list | Productivity | 60 | 246 |
| journal | Productivity | 60 | 244 |
| sleep tracker | Health & Fitness | 59 | 64 |
| pdf scanner | Productivity | 59 | 311 |
| calorie counter | Health & Fitness | 57 | 96 |
| habit tracker | Productivity | 56 | 456 |
| meal planner | Food & Drink | 53 | 249 |
| workout tracker | Health & Fitness | 52 | 246 |

Note how *habit tracker* scores higher than *meal planner* overall but ranks 456th in its category, close to falling off the list, because Productivity is full of high-volume brand searches.

### The 1–5 score

The 1–5 field is a coarse bucket of the same data. In the US list, a **3** covered scores from 41 to 60 (79% of all terms), a **4** covered 60–80, and a **5** covered 80–100. No listed term was a 1 or 2. If a tool shows you the 1–5 value, it is telling you almost nothing about generic keywords.

## Is it on a log scale?

Apple doesn't say how the 1–100 score maps to actual searches, and we haven't found anyone who has measured it reliably. Treat the differences as an ordering: a 60 gets more searches than a 50, which gets more than a 45. Don't assume a 60 is "20% more" than a 50.

## How we use it to pick keywords

The score is one input. On its own it pushes you toward searches you can't win. This is the process we use for small apps:

1. **Start from what your app does, not from the list.** Collect the phrases a user would type. The [keyword field guide](/blog/app-store-keyword-field/) covers how the App Store combines words, so you don't need every variant.
2. **Look up each phrase's score.** If it has one, note the score and its four-week trend. If it doesn't, it's below the cut-off.
3. **Order the unscored terms with autocomplete.** App Store autocomplete suggests a phrase earlier when more people search it. A phrase suggested after two or three letters is more searched than one that needs the whole word. That's the estimate Fledly uses for terms without an Apple score, and it's labelled as an estimate.
4. **Check who ranks.** A score of 60 with a top 10 full of apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings is a worse target than a 48 where three of the top 10 are small or off-topic.
5. **Spend the title and subtitle on the best winnable searches**, typically scores in the high 40s to low 60s for a new app, and put the supporting words in the keyword field.
6. **Watch the trend.** Weekly history makes it possible to spot searches that are rising before the big apps notice. We compare each term's latest week with four weeks earlier.

An example from our [meal-planner teardown](/blog/budget-meal-planner-apps/): *meal planner* scores 53 and has been flat for a month. *AI meal planner* has no Apple score, but it is the **first** autocomplete suggestion after typing "ai mea". For a new app, the second phrase may be the better title keyword: fewer searches, but much less competition.

## How to get the data

Apple Ads shows popularity when you choose keywords for a campaign, and the full weekly lists are available through the Apple Ads Platform API with an Apple Ads account and API credentials. Apple's API documentation includes example requests. In our experience a week's data appears roughly a week after it ends, and history goes back well over a year (our US and Finnish data starts in July 2025).

Fledly pulls these lists every week, keeps the history, and shows every keyword's score, trend and source. If the score is Apple's, it says so; if it's our autocomplete estimate, it says that instead.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is Apple Ads search popularity?

It is Apple's relative measure of how often a search term is used on the App Store in a country, on a scale of 1 to 100, where 100 is the most popular search in that country. Apple publishes it weekly and monthly through Apple Ads.

### Is search popularity the same as search volume?

No. It is a relative score, not a number of searches, and Apple doesn't publish how scores map to volume. Use it to compare and rank search terms.

### Why does my keyword have no popularity score?

Apple only lists the most popular 500 search terms per App Store category and country. In the US, the lowest listed score in October 2026 was between 41 and 55 depending on the category. A keyword without a score is less popular than that cut-off; it may still get searches.

### What is a good search popularity score for a new app?

For a new app, generic searches scoring roughly 45 to 65 are often the best targets. Scores above 70 are mostly brand names. Always check how strong the apps already ranking for the search are.

### What does a popularity of 5 mean?

Many tools show 5 as the minimum value. It usually means the term is below Apple's list cut-off, not that it was measured at 5.

## Sources

- Apple Developer: [Search Term Popularity Query](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-ads-platform-api/query-app-search-term-popularity-data) and [SearchTermPopularityQueryResponse](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-ads-platform-api/searchtermpopularityqueryresponse) (field definitions). Checked October 27, 2026.
- Fledly's stored Apple Ads search popularity data: US weekly lists from July 2025 to the week of October 18, 2026; Finland for the same week.